Question: is it Houze's responsibility to use every bit of skill and legal knowledge he has to protect Terri's constitutional rights or to try to get an acquittal even if she killed this child in cold blood?
I am not a lawyer but this is how I understand the ethics of the legal system:
To give any client less than his best effort would be unethical, I believe. It is not his job to covertly team up with the prosecution to get his client convicted.
I believe our system is largely weighted in favour of the prosecution (any prosecutor who has less than a 90% conviction rate should get a different day job).
Will Houze get her a jury loaded with divorced women who think Kaine is the embodiment of their ex-husband...and see acquitting Terri as payback? Throw in a few men who think she's too pretty to be guilty? Did the Founding Fathers envision that kind of jury selection?
The prosecution gets to conduct voir dire, just as the defence does. They get to dismiss just as many candidates as the defence does. While the defence tries to get the jury most suited to their point of view, the prosecution is doing the same thing.
So far as the founding fathers were concerned, I believe the evidence tends to show that they envisioned juries comprised solely of white male landowners. I will never forget that in the first presidential election, there were only approximately 34,000 qualified voters out of a population of approximately 2 million. Since women did not have the vote, nor did slaves (in some places, even freed slaves were not allowed to vote), nor did Native Americans, nor did many other groups... well, once you cut out the number of disenfranchised people, the number of actual voters was only 1.7% of the actual population.
That's not exactly a shining standard of democracy as we think of it today.
Likewise, standards have changed as to acceptable standards in many other areas. For example, many of those Founding Fathers were slave owners. They owned human beings and exercised complete power over them. George Washington himself was probably guilty of using loopholes in the law to illegally retain ownership of his slaves and when any of his slaves escaped, he used the services of brutal slave hunters to attempt to re-capture them.
My point is that the Founding Fathers came up with an amazing document but were not, themselves, completely above reproach. In many ways, they lived their lives in ways that would be seen as despicable and horrifying today.
Will he work to get the emails showing her intense hatred and desire to hurt a 7 year old..thrown out...so the jury can never know the way this woman's mind works?
If the prosecution introduces such evidence, it is Houze's job to challenge it and the judge's job to rule on the challenge according to specific rules of evidence.
Houze's job is to put on the best defence he is capable of mounting. It would be unethical for him to collude, directly or indirectly, with the prosecution to get his client convicted.
Will he try to demonize Kaine and/or Desiree on the stand in order to make his client look like she was THEIR victim?
Will the prosecution try to demonize TMH in order to make her look as guilty as possible? Of course. There are at least two sides to every story and neither side is required to present both sides at once.
Will he be looking for ways to undermine EVEN WHAT HE KNOWS to be the truth...so that his client may go home one day, sink into her favorite chair, smile and say...."I did it. I killed that freaking kid I hated. And Mr. Big Bucks got me the slick lawyers I needed...and WOW! Hurrah! and Joy to the world! I'm home free!! Cry your eyes out, Kaine and Desiree..I killed your brat and got away with it!"
Is that what the founding Fathers had in mind?
Thomas Jefferson said "better a thousand guilty men go free than one innocent man be imprisoned." In other words, I believe that he was endorsing the risk that a guilty person might be acquitted because he believed that affording (part of) the populace strong constitutional rights was a greater good.